But as the architect and driver of the campaign that brought big-league baseball to Denver, Jacobs negotiated a tough course. He steered Denver’s proposal to get a Major League Baseball expansion team through hairpin curves and up steep grades against stopwatch deadlines.

What was at stake, along with the atmospheric price tag, might make a charge up Colorado’s most famous mountain seem like a Sunday drive down Main Street. The wait in Denver for major-league baseball was 30 years and counting. It wasn’t an issue of thousands of dollars or a few million. The price tag to get in was $95 million.

“It turned out to be a heck of a story,” Jacobs said from his downtown Denver office last week. “It wasn’t easy. It became a quest for me, and for a period of time it took over my life. A lot of people said we were going to fail.”

Jacobs, a senior partner at a large Denver legal firm, entered the picture on Aug. 17, 1990. Three days before, a key factor in Denver’s eventual successful bid was achieved. Voters in the then six-county Denver area authorized an increase in sales tax of 0.1 percent to fund a new baseball park if a franchise was awarded to Denver. However, ownership potential for a team in Denver was up in the air, and the application to the National League’s expansion committee was due in less than a month.

Gov. Roy Romer invited interested ownership representatives to the Aug. 17 meeting. Jacobs attended along with Steve Earhart, who grew up in Lakewood and was in the sports management business, and Mike Nicklous, an East Coast businessman who was said to be the principal ownership candidate.

A week later, Romer announced he was giving the Jacobs-Earhart team the task of putting an ownership group together to bring major-league baseball to Denver.

No sooner than Nicklous appeared on the scene, he faded away, and Mickey Monus and John Antonucci, whom Earhart knew from other sports ventures, came on to be the general partners. By March, Jacobs had commitments to meet the $95 million expansion fee. The final stroke was bringing the Coors Brewing Co. into the group. Only two franchises would be awarded, and the competition was stiff, with Denver; Miami; Tampa, Fla.; Orlando, Fla.; Washington, D.C.; and Buffalo in contention.

The expansion committee visited Denver on March 26, 1991, and after a tour of Mile High Stadium, the committee was greeted by about 1,500 fans in the atrium at 17th and Broadway. The fans sang, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” as the committee members entered.

“I looked over at Phyllis Collins, and tears were streaming down her cheeks,” Jacobs said.

Collins was an executive in the league office.

On July 5, in a downtown Denver hotel, NL president Bill White made the announcement that Denver and Miami had been voted into the National League. But three weeks later, Monus delivered a bombshell. He came to Denver and told Jacobs he had to sell his $20 million share in the ownership.

Jerry McMorris, Oren Benton and Charlie Monfort from the limited partner side of the group quickly stepped up and filled the gap.

“We came closer to losing the franchise at that point than I thought at the time, and we hadn’t even played a game,” Jacobs said. “I was nervous about everything. There were so many serendipitous things that happened that allowed us to put it together. It was unbelievable.”

Twenty years ago today, Jacobs was practicing law as a senior partner in a Denver firm with a passing interest in the campaign to bring major-league baseball to Denver. His interest soon changed to an obsession, and the history of baseball in Denver hasn’t been the same.

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